Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday April 19, 2011 @11:43AM
from the i'm-adding-moats dept.

Wamoc writes "Google has invited 'citizen cartographers' to refine the US map for Google Maps and Google Earth. 'Today we're opening the map of the United States in Google Map Maker for you to add your expert local knowledge directly. You know your neighborhood or hometown best, and with Google Map Maker you can ensure the places you care about are richly represented on the map. For example, you can fix the name of your local pizza parlor, or add a description of your favorite book store.'"

Why is this marked flamebait ? It could be true, I've noticed a lot of the free or cheap iPhone apps use Openstreetmaps' maps. It creates a base of people that benefit from making the maps ever more accurate. That has got to scare Google: maps is one of the levers they use, along with gmail, to differentiate their mobile platform from other platforms (and unlicensed Android versions)

"Hey y'all, don't you wish you could be white washing this here picket fence? I gotta great job, betcha you wish you could be spending the afternoon white washing this here fence, you suckers..."

Seriously, Sergei (and you, too, Arianna. Especially You!) people work for you, you pay them. This Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney "Hey, kids, let's put on a show in my grandma's barn, we can call it 'User Generated Content!'" shit has gone about as far as it can and should go.

Or maybe "Geez it would be nice to be able to spent 15 sec fixing that road segment that always results in google maps routing me around, which wastes 10 minutes of my day"
Having worked with city and county mapping services there are a lot of little mistakes on maps that a simple tweak could easily fix.
OTOH, if you don't want to, don't do it.

I can see this falling into the same trap as the Street View removal procedure - people can abuse it to harm their competitors.

On Street View if you find a competitors shop, point the cursor at the flat above it or the car parked in front of it and claim that it is yours Google will remove it. No checking, they just take your word for it. Now if someone looks up their address and wants to see an image of the shop front they can't. Similarly you can now make subtle alterations to the maps that will result in

You're just upset because your parents never got you a sandbox when you were a kid, I understand.
User generated content can and will go much much further. A simple project like "Accurately label every location of interest in the US" is a big much, even for google. And people benefit from such a map, so why wouldn't they spend a couple minutes to make a correction to their favorite businesses?

Gaming of the system is the next logical step. One might be able to route people to one's neighborhood by submitting false one-way streets, road closures, altered speed limits, and traffic jam reports.

OpenStreetMaps is a classic grass-roots effort. People have sweat blood making OSM work, proving the "business" model, working out the kinks, and donating immeasurable time towards making this a success. Now that somebody has done the dirty work to prove that this method of crowd-sourcing maps can work, Google trots out its sexy service that will grab the buzz, divert the resources, advertise interest away and steal the user cycles towards improving its own closed proprietary maps. Yes, that's correct, proprietary -- there's no guarantee that what you do will remain freely available.

Has everyone forgotten the CDDB debacle? Quoting wiki [wikipedia.org]: "The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License, and many people submitted CD information thinking the service would also remain free." Those of you who remember will recognize what an understatement that is. Needless to say, those users were wrong and one day they found that all their effort was suddenly swallowed up and they were being asked to pay for access to the data they submitted.

I don't believe Google is evil and I don't work with OSM, but if Google is not evil it has to realize the negative impacts its actions can have on the kinds of grassroots open-source efforts it claims to support. Google is not stepping in to use its resources to do what the crowd cannot -- it will end up undercutting a project where the crowd was doing just fine on its own. And the ordinary Joes need to realize what is going on and channel their efforts to the project where they will own the product. OpenStreetMap.

I don't believe Google is evil and I don't work with OSM, but if Google is not evil it has to realize the negative impacts its actions can have on the kinds of grassroots open-source efforts it claims to support.

I once interviewed for a job at Google. Made it through 13 rounds. During interview #14, I was pontificating on the "don't be evil" mantra and suggested that, even without evil intent, the reverberating effects of radical changes in technology shouldn't be ignored. I said something along the lines that I'm sure that Google could come up with a way to offer absolutely free web hosting--no Geocities-esque banners or anything--and absolutely kill hundreds or thousands of small service vendors overnight.

Now that somebody has done the dirty work to prove that this method of crowd-sourcing maps can work,

Mapmaker has been available outside the US in countries with more limited map data for years now - I worked on mapping parts of semi-rural India. The tools on OSM are good, better than Google's in many ways, but Google Maps does have a certain weight of presence. If putting in a minor update here or there helps people who use Google Maps by default (e.g., Android Navigation users), what is wrong with that?

Is there anything preventing Google from using the OSM data itself in Google Maps? It used to be licensed CC-BY-SA, so it would be perfectly fine to embed it into Google Maps with correct attribution, in a similar fashion as the Wikipedia data. OSM is in a process of relicensing now, but I'd imagine the same would work with ODbL, too.

The OSM data for my area is very detailed, including building outlines, landmarks, park benches, and dog poop dispensers (no kidding). Shame Google didn't opt for interoperabil

Is there anything preventing Google from using the OSM data itself in Google Maps?

The OSM data license is an open-source license that would require Google to reciprocate and allow its map data to be used by the OSM project.... something that Google most definitely doesn't want to have happen. This is something where they can't have their cake and eat it too. If they displayed the OSM data as a "separate view" being a "community contribution view" that could in turn be put into the OSM database, sure.... they could do that.

The OSM data license is an open-source license that would require Google to reciprocate and allow its map data to be used by the OSM project.... something that Google most definitely doesn't want to have happen.

Actualy, as I understand it, Google buys a lot of their mapping info from, well, companies that specialize in mapping, as well as business info (for POI)... so it's probably not something they're even allowed to open source, in many cases...

So if Google uses the OSM data as an overlay in Google Maps, it has to release its own mapping data? It doesn't seem all that clear cut, to me. After all, they "mix in" Wikipedia articles, apparently without issues. And release what, exactly, the vector geodata? The sat imagery? The "yellow pages" stuff like company names and adresses, customer ratings? Seems like determining when something is a derived work and where the derived work starts and ends is even more difficult than with free software.

As an overlay, I don't think that would be a problem. The issue is mixing in the mapping data and combining with non-open source mapping data and prohibiting derivative works from the end result. I don't see how Google could get that accomplished.

The data Google uses is licensed from mapping companies so they can't make it available for free in its native format, only present it as a rendered map or navigation instructions.

I don't see how this is much different from YouTube or any other user-generated content site. You work for free producing valuable content, the site owner distributes it and makes money from advertising. Okay, here we have commercial data as a starting point, but the basic concept of getting people to do the hard work for free is

The issue here is that there is a fairly substantial project that has been explicitly generating map data under an open-source license (until very recently, they have been using CC-by-SA). That differs substantially with YouTube and other commercial companies showing user generated content because you are and must be permitted to obtain the original source material and be able to remix, reuse, and re-edit the data.

If you mix the data from the OSM project, all of the data must also be available for reuse, i

I too would prefer it to be open. I am trying to develop technology for people to monitor traffic outside their homes and upload the data to a central database. We don't have very good traffic data in the UK. The technology is proving to be difficult though as it has to be both cheap and low power.

of course, there's always the fact that "map maker" was available in multiple other countries before "opening" it for usa. which means others have had a chance to ask "why do this if there's osm" already;) http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Kompa/diary/10047 [openstreetmap.org]

I just noticed that http://open.mapquest.com/ [mapquest.com] includes some changes and deletions I made near my house a few months back. It is good to see that someone is actually trying to use the data I've provided, and seeing this encourages me to provide more updates to further make OSM match reality...while simultaneously discouraging me from playing with Google's new tools, which don't seem open at all.

changes usually appear on http://open.mapquest.com/ [mapquest.com] quite quickly, and that includes both rendering and searching. not too surprising, given that they employ some key osm project developers;)

Sounds like all of the fun that Gracenote [wikipedia.org] did with the CDDB several years ago. A very much for-profit company who collected a ton of information from volunteers and then turned it into a for-profit business that screwed over the volunteers who couldn't even access the database for their own contributions without paying a licensing fee.

I like Open Street Map, and that was my first thought when I heard that Google was letting volunteer contributions in. Google has in fact been a real pain in the behind to that project and does view it as the "competition".

I'm a bit worried, but from your wikipedia ref, about Gracenote "many listing contributors believed that the database was open-source", which it never was.

Openstreetmap is.

You can even, like me, enter the supporting Foundation: rather than just donating, you'll get some control, you'd be able to vote against openness change if it ever comes (currently, the recent licence evolutions are definitely towards more openness in fact)

But indeed, OSM is geared so that legally speaking, each single streetpoint you ma

I have been an OSM contributor myself, and I'm sorry if I implied that the OSM volunteers and organizers are seeking to make a profit off of their activities... at least following the Gracenote fiasco path.

I agree that legally speaking the OSM license is such that the data generated can't reshaped into a proprietary license. There were many contributors to the CDDB that thought the database being generated was open sourced and that was implied while it was being developed... at least until it was too late

Because Google Maps needs less work. It's easier to get people to make small corrections to an already mature system than it is to get people to make fundamental contributions to something that doesn't meet their needs yet.

Depends where you are. For some places in Europe, OSM is vastly more complete than Google, showing post boxes and rubbish bins. I'm about to leave for Tajikistan, and I see that there's very little detail there, but for how many users is that a problem?

Because OSM and OSM based products suck. I wish they didn't, and I'd love to use them, but they're pretty much useless for anything real-world - at least here in Germany.

I've tried a bunch of OSM based Android apps for both general mapping and navigation, and the maps just aren't up to par... crowdsourcing is great and all, but it's just not complete or detailed enough.

Now adding to or correcting Google's maps... that I could see working...

Indeed, my next GPS definitely will be based on Openstreetmap. Whatever the cost. Map upgrades will be free, and will incorporate all I personally added in.If in addition the hardware too could be "less monopoly" (ie, not Apple nor Android nor win-based) this would be perfect, alas, I fear I dream here -and moreover will be flamebait-modded by you android users;-)

I added loose women's houses, geohashing locations I visited, places where I've slept, the trees I admire most, and tons of sidewalk graffiti sites, but those damn dirty deletionists removed them all! How can it be useful if they remove such critical information?

Right.. that is why we can find out the addresses of all the camwhores on wikipedia right? Oh wai..

I hope you also realize that Wikipedia is full of vandalisms. (E.g., I learned from there that iron is extracted from monkeys, the bridges of ancient Rome were manufactured in Japan, or that didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes. The last one actually had a whole page on the German Wikipedia for more than a year.) It's also full of idiots thinking that they're actually doing a favour to the world by changing st

After submitting that they have my street name wrong and the next one over with it's label, and another one missing, years ago, I can just do it myself? This, this is just epic genius! I mean, that thought never went though my mind. Completely unobvious.

My street is one way, but Google Maps displays it one way in the wrong direction. I've submitted a report oh, about five years ago, and still no change. I'm looking forward to opening this up for Hungary as well, so I can make that goddamn change, since it breaks all routes planned by Maps.

After submitting that they have my street name wrong and the next one over with it's label, and another one missing, years ago,

That's strange. I submitted a correction for two streets where I live that had the names mixed up and about a month later, they sent me an email thanking me and the switch was made. OSM had the same error (must have came from the Tiger data) and I just fixed it myself. Not sure why your change wasn't made to GM.

I emailed them with a pdf map of all the bike routes in my city, and they had the map updated a few months later with a nice email thanking me. Yea a few months isnt great turnaround but the fact that they have a much more complete map of the bike trails was a big plus to me.

Saving a handful of people the trouble of a u-turn or a three-point turn when they realize they made a wrong turn? This is truly god's work, friend.

It's often overlooked in favor of high-profile "causes" like "feeding and clothing the poor" and "providing quality medical care to people who've never had it" and (it's okay to roll your eyes) "childhood education." But it's just as important - perhaps even MORE important, in fact!

Did you know: In the last days of her life, Mother Teresa was overheard to rem

Helping people avoid wrong turns reduces traffic on the streets that were incorrectly referred, which has potential to increase pedestrian safety (as there are less cars traveling). It saves drivers time and frustration. It seems like it's a universally good thing - why do you ridicule it? Do you also ridicule people that pick up litter, or volunteer as crossing guards?

The guy isn't making a crusade of it, he just wants less people to (mistakenly) turn onto his street. Seems pretty understandable. As a driv

I suspect for the same reasons you're posting to/., instead of helping to feed and cloth the poor, or campaigning for better childhood education - humans tend to be shallow, self-absorbed narcissists, and often need a kick in the ass to jolt them out of their narrow frame of reference to gather some perspective. I make no claim that I'm immune to this tendency. I have several exes who would also gleefully tell you that I can be a prick, so if you absolutely must feel that you're not subject to the same f

Damnit, it's almost 6 in the morning and I can't sleep. I just knew some asshole was gonna keep me up tonight on/. because he was a douche and I had to correct him.

It isn't about a 3 point turn, it's about it's hard to find the fucking road, even though it is right there, and people get confused. People have crossed over a ditch on foot several times to knock on my door, looking for the road that I live on.... I know you don't give a shit about people saving hassle knowing where they are going but those th

After submitting that they have my street name wrong and the next one over with it's label, and another one missing, years ago, I can just do it myself? This, this is just epic genius! I mean, that thought never went though my mind. Completely unobvious.

I just wish that we could fix bad labels on Google Earth. I've sent a couple of emails telling them that they've misspelled Paruro, Peru, and that the locations of a couple of nearby villages are wrong, but neither is fixed yet.

All that talk about not being evil is all fine and dandy. But how come Android does not have a decent off line map application? They say Google maps works fine in iPad/iPhone. But in Android, if you don't have a data plan, it simply does not work [*]

GPS is free. In fact first few phones with GPS were totally offline operations with the maps cached locally not forcing a data plan. But pretty quickly the carriers and hand set makers colluded to make it non workable and they all peddle dataplans at various l

All that talk about not being evil is all fine and dandy. But how come Android does not have a decent off line map application?

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Android has several, including osmand.

As for your complaints about Google Maps not having an offline mode and whining about a cabal between Google and the carriers - on Android, it caches map data which is now vector-based, not prerendered tiles. They were waiting for device processors speeds and 3D abilities to become suitable. If you tra

There are also some decent OSM apps. I have one on my ancient N80. It's a J2ME thing. You run a desktop Java app, select a rectangle on the map, and it generates a J2ME app embedding that data. It can also integrate with the GPS if your device has one or you have an external bluetooth one. If your device allows J2ME apps to use the filesystem (mine doesn't), then you can also just copy maps across to it separately, and it can grab them from the Internet itself if you have signal (generally, when I need

Because most Android-powered devices sold in the United States are mobile telephones, not PDA/PMP devices such as Archos 43. Devices without a cellular radio are more likely to not have a GPS receiver either. They're also likely to run AOSP Android, which doesn't come with Android Market, instead of OHA Android, which does. As for using a phone with only a voice plan and no data plan, only recently have those become available in the United States. The United States market is relevant because it is the home

I use MapDroyd all the time. It's not perfect, but it uses a fraction of the power (battery) used by Google Maps, and I can look at it on the Underground (no signal) before I get above-ground, or use it abroad (no signal because of roaming). It also enabled me to get back to the hotel when I took the wrong night bus in Slovakia.

There is both a good and a bad side to this. Ignoring the wikipedia type abuse that will occur it will probably be a net good, however say goodbye to favorite places that only locals or a few know about. Someone will put it on Google.

Ever discover a good side road that works to get around traffic? A friend and I who carpooled found one. One day a radio station started a segment where people could call in with traffic tips. Someone glowing described this wonderful detour. The next day it was as stalled an

Ever discover a good side road that works to get around traffic? A friend and I who carpooled found one. One day a radio station started a segment where people could call in with traffic tips. Someone glowing described this wonderful detour. The next day it was as stalled and backed up as the highway. Years later I went that way again, still as screwed up. I suspect this sort of thing to happen with various other kind of favorite spots.

Works both ways. There is a truly major interstate highway project in my area, biggest in a couple decades, maybe the biggest project since the interstate was built decades ago. The conventional wisdom is the interstate will therefore be a parking lot during rush hour, so take any possible non-interstate route home, avoid the interstate at all costs, its the inter-apocalypse, etc. The actual result is the interstate is a ghost town and I get home about 5 to 10 minutes earlier than normal now, even though

I've used it 3 times and was contacted within 2 days (not automated, it was from a person). Correction made within 1-2 weeks.

1) Misspelling of my street name in google maps resulted in it being impossible to search for2) Streetview pointing at a "highway" that was actually just forest (the exit was a few hundred feet back)3) Fixing street name at a new address.

I never got any result. It will still route you through an underpass that was never built (it's just an old road dead-ending into the berm they built for the interstate) and through a locked gate to private land that's shown as a through-road. Not a good deal, since in both cases you have to backtrack significantly (7 miles in the latter case) to get to a usable route.

A while back I added the hours for a business near where I live (their schedule is a little bit odd - they're only open Wednesday-Saturday). And you've always been able to report a problem with the map, as long as I can remember (although I don't think in some countries it allows that).

Sure, you don't get paid, but at least you get the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing someone else's stock price rise.

Ok, so you won't be allowed to directly query the data yourself after you give it to them, but at least you'll know that it might come up on your page, along with their ads, if you embed their javascript.

We have 3 building on our HQ campus, I went in to outline each building and tag it with the appropriate address to make it easier for people to find the correct building when they visit the campus. There's no apparent way to do that as you have to specify a type of business when you select the drawing tool and none of the categories fit.

Let's see, where would you find elephants [wikipedia.org] on the map? Oh, right, Google says they're located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, 20006, and the population of them has tripled in the last few years since Barnum and Bailey came to town.

It's easy enough to confirm - just look at all the geotagged photos on Flickr and Google that show circus tents and elephants out front.

More likely, "Joe's Pizza" will now be changed to "PENUS PENUS PENUS PENUS PENUS PENUS PENUS PENUS".I didn't RTFA but will google be able to handle vandalization and misinformation? Will it be similar to wikipedia?

Probably not, but you can finally say, "Hey Google, Joe's Pizza closed up shop a year ago, there's a pet store in there now!". That's something I've been missing sorely around here in Germany... hope we're able to do this soon.